Rev. George Zimmerman Explains It All For Us

One of our kind wrote a great lengthy book whose primary message was summed up in only three words: Religion poisons everything. I thought I had encountered almost every manifestation of that axiom until I watched the Today Show this morning and caught excerpts of last night's Hannity Show on Fox. If anyone had doubt Sean is Fox News' most disgusting pundit, they'd see it vanish on exposure to the wacky Irish-American's interview with the man to be tried in Florida for the second degree murder of a young black man named Trayvon Martin. Having despised and detested Mr. Hannity every since I first watched five minutes of Fox News some years back, it was difficult to fight down my nausea just to find out what Matt Lauer and company were regurgitating. It goes without saying that NBC rarely reprises anything from Mr. Murdoch's news network.

My lower draw dropped to my chest and I almost fell out of my recliner when George Zimmerman referred to his outright murder of Trayvon as "all a part of God's plan." OK, so some wags would respond by saying Zimmerman did us all a favor by comparing his acts to the Divine Will. By Zimmerman's logic, Hitler was acting by Divine Will when he slaughtered six or seven million Jews, just as Ahmadinejad was acting with Divine Will when he denied that the Holocaust even occurred at all. Pol Pot murdered untold hundred thousands in Cambodia when he took a simple, agricultural native population there and tortured them into debasement as tools of a Communist regime. The illustrations are legion, but you get the idea.

But wait, it gets worse. Zimmerman, looking right into the camera, "apologized" to the Martin family, saying "I pray for them daily." Prayer is an insult to survivors of those on whom you've preyed. As if Zimmerman's prayers are going to assuage the sorrow of that young man's bereaved -- and properly incensed -- family. But the interview proved yet another problem with dialogue based on religious dogma: it turns the devout into hypocrites. The only possible answer to the question, in this instance, W.W.J.D., is forgiveness, and the Martins are hardly ready to do that. Zimmerman even debased religion to a greater degree when he told Spammity he was willing to meet with the family. The Martins declined, claiming the offer was a cynical farce.

In my practice, I find it routine for criminals, once incarcerated, to "find God" in jails and prisons. Zimmerman probably was a poor Christian before the crime, and he's going to go on being a poor Christian. It was just another in an endless, steady stream of those who hide behind faith to make one seem less guilty or more worthy of pardon: the crutch all Christians use to prop up their excuses for the vile things that they do. Because I do not worship his "God," I am free to say that once this jerk is imprisoned, someone, perhaps a black supremacist gang in the joint, will arrange to acquaint Saint George with that marvelous tool of Divine Retribution: the shiv.

The universe in which the crew of the Gay Deceiver settled briefly, looking for a safe place to have their babies. It was pastoral, libertarian, and mostly very dull. The history was slightly different from the crew's homeworld: There was no slavery, but much indenture; and sometime in the 16th century the oceans had risen considerably, changing the coastlines and much of the political situation.